The other Lott controversy

Editor's note: John Lott disagrees with many points in this column. He has sent this link as a response to what is said below.

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For those few of us in the mainstream media who openly support Second
Amendment rights, research scholar John Lott has been-or rather, had
been-an absolute godsend.

Armed with top-notch credentials (including stints at Stanford, Rice,
UCLA, Wharton, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and Yale), Lott took
on the entrenched anti-gun bias of the ivory tower with seemingly
meticulous scholarship. His best-selling 1998 book, "More Guns, Less
Crime," provided analysis of FBI crime data that showed a groundbreaking
correlation between concealed-weapons laws and reduced violent crime
rates.

I met Lott briefly after a seminar at the University of Washington in
Seattle several years ago and was deeply impressed by his intellectual
rigor. Lott responded directly and extensively to critics' arguments. He
made his data accessible to many other researchers.

But as he prepares to release a new book, "Bias Against Guns," next
month, Lott must grapple with an emerging controversy-brought to the
public eye by the blogosphere-that goes to the heart of his academic
integrity.

The most disturbing charge, first raised by retired University of
California/Santa Barbara professor Otis Dudley Duncan and pursued by
Australian computer programmer Tim Lambert, is that Lott fabricated a
study claiming that 98% of defensive gun uses involved mere brandishing,
as opposed to shooting.

When Lott cited the statistic peripherally on page 3 of his book, he
attributed it to "national surveys." In the second edition, he changed
the citation to "a national survey that I conducted." He has also
incorrectly attributed the figure to newspaper polls and Florida State
University criminologist Gary Kleck.

Last fall, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren
volunteered to investigate the claimed existence of Lott's 1997
telephone survey of 2,424 people. "I thought it would be exceedingly
simple to establish" that the research had been done, Lindgren wrote in
his report (posted online at
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/lindgren.html).

It was not simple. Lott claims to have lost all of his data due to a
computer crash. He financed the survey himself and kept no financial
records. He has forgotten the names of the students who allegedly helped
with the survey and who supposedly dialed thousands of survey
respondents long-distance from their own dorm rooms using survey
software Lott can't identify or produce.

Assuming the survey data was lost in a computer crash, it is still
remarkable that Lott could not produce a single, contemporaneous scrap
of paper proving the survey's existence, such as the research protocol
or survey instrument. After Lindgren's report was published, a Minnesota
gun rights activist named David Gross came forward, claiming he was
surveyed in 1997. Some have said that Gross's account proves that the
survey was done. I think skepticism is warranted.

Lott now admits he used a fake persona, "Mary Rosh," to post voluminous
defenses of his work over the Internet. "Rosh" gushed that Lott was "the
best professor that I ever had." She/he also penned an effusive review
of "More Guns, Less Crime" on Amazon.com: "It was very interesting
reading and Lott writes very well." (Lott claims that one of his sons
posted the review in "Rosh's" name.) Just last week, "Rosh" complained
on a blog comment board: "Critics such as Lambert and Lindgren ought to
slink away and hide."

By itself, there is nothing wrong with using a pseudonym. But Lott's
invention of Mary Rosh to praise his own research and blast other
scholars is beyond creepy. And it shows his extensive willingness to
deceive to protect and promote his work.

Some Second Amendment activists believe there is an anti-gun conspiracy
to discredit Lott as "payback" for the fall of Michael Bellesiles, the
disgraced former Emory University professor who engaged in rampant
research fraud to bolster his anti-gun book, "Arming America." But it
wasn't an anti-gun zealot who unmasked Rosh/Lott. It was Internet
blogger Julian Sanchez, a staffer at the libertarian Cato Institute,
which staunchly defends the Second Amendment. And it was the
conservative Washington Times that first reported last week on the
survey dispute in the mainstream press.

In an interview Monday, Lott stressed that his new defensive gun use
survey (whose results will be published in the new book) will show
similar results to the lost survey. But the existence of the new survey
does not lay to rest the still lingering doubts about the old survey's
existence.

The media coverage of the 1997 survey data dispute, Lott told me, is "a
bunch to do about nothing." I wish I could agree.